What off the shelf wifi 6 router should I get? There are three people who play online games and everyone in the house watch online streaming services.
Depends on your budget and the size, shape, and material of your house.
2,800sqft two story, drywall through out, plywood + drywall garage. Outside is stucco. I’m willing to spend 400 USD; maybe a little more if it’s worth it.
IMO I’d go for having separate wifi APs. Ubiquiti Unifi and Tp-Link Omada are the vendors to look at for this. They offer both routers and APs that work together. Also for that kind of space having two APs may work best.
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Is the house more like a square or a long rectangle? If it is a square I would recommend not prioritizing using a mesh system. But if it is a long narrow space I would probably consider mesh if you not interested in having a separate router and AP.
I also thing having a separate router and AP is ideal, but it can be too cost prohibitive or complicated for some. All depends if you want to learn about networking or just want your internet to work well enough.
House is a square shape. I don’t mind having sperate equipment or maintaining it; however, I’m not sure if the other people in the house will be able to troubleshoot issues if I’m not here.
With regard to the Access Point, is it wired or will it connect to the router wirelessly? The reason why I ask is, I’m not sure running an ethernet to each AP will be viable.
If it is not wired then it really can’t be considered an access point. Some AP’s have mesh capabilities but then you would need to buy more than one, which is much more expensive then buying a cable or just starting with a mesh system.
I don’t think you would need more than 1 AP for the size of your house. Could you not just plug it close to where you would put your router if you can’t lay cable anywhere?
In terms of maintenance as long as everyone isn’t using complicated features it should be a set it and forget it kind of thing. If you want to use complicated features then there are ways of doing it without it affecting everyone, as long as the router has enterprise features.
Running a cable is definitely an option. I can convince my roommates to run the cable inside the wall and into the ceiling if mounting the AP to the ceiling is the preferred way.
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Any other recommendations?
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I’d go for the EAP610 - the EAP660 is designed for dense deployments (hundreds of users), so it isn’t going to give you much for nearly twice the price. I haven’t used Omada so can’t comment on the router, but looks like it will work fine.
For unifi the Dream Router and U6-Lite AP would do what you want.
If you wanted to go for a consumer router, I’d go to your local home electronics store and see what midrange options they have available. Paying more for consumer routers usually doesn’t bring many improvements to WiFi (more antennas doesn’t mean more range). And honestly there isn’t much difference to the brands in that segment. However the dedicated APs should give you better wifi than a consumer router.
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For consumer routers Asus is the way to go. They also have AP’s/“extenders” if you need them but I would stick with Asus regardless.
Edit: they are sold as mesh systems by Asus but they support wired Ethernet backhauls which essentially makes the AP’s.
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If you want a router in the price range similar to the one you posted I would recommend the GL.iNet GL-B1300 (Convexa-B) since it uses open source software that can be changed and has VPN functionality already built in.
Also keep in mind if you don’t want to also run a power cable to your AP you would also need a POE injector for it.
As for AP recommendations. Your’s is fine, but I would also like to recommend these 2 from EnGenius either one is fine.
There is also an option to buy them with a POE injector.
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2c
Get an access point and a real router.
All consumer combo router/wifi gear is trash.
If you have to go consumer maybe asus. Bad history but they were sued in a class action (I believe) over lack of firmware updates and are now legally compelled to fix security issues in their products for some reasonable time frame.
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While 11ax still can be a bit unreliable in my experience I’d recommend to go for as new Qualcomm hardware as possible as their platforms appears to be most stable / reliable. Qualcomm - WikiDevi.Wi-Cat.RU can give you a few hints about potential models but it will probably require you to do some research on your own too.
You can get very reasonable performance out of running OpenWrt on consumer hardware and save quite a bit compared to prosoumer/enterprise gear for residential usage but that limits you to 11ac in most cases except for Mediatek platforms but I don’t know how stable 11ax is yet. 11ac is very solid in my experience but such hardware can be a bit hard to come by these days. Totolink A8000RU runs great as AP (and probably router too) with very good range for example but it’s EoL. 
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I have three of the EWS377s (2.5GbE) going into a pfSense Negate 2100 appliance. I used to use ASUS consumer/prosumer gear. I would recommend ASUS if you can’t do APs otherwise, get a router appliance and separate APs for each floor at the very least.
Ill have a look at everything and figure out what direction to go in. However, I’m leaning towards going the serperate AP route.
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That is the better and more robust option. It also gives you more room for growth and hardware longevity.
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Let us know what you choose and how it goes.
I purchased
Motorola MB8600 DOCSIS 3.1 Cable Modem
I want to stay within an ecosystem with a dashboard that can control most if not all of the devices. The main driving force was the cost and feature set. Honestly, I would of preferred to go with Ubiqity, but I probably would have been sitting around the 600 to 700 dollar range.
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Hardware wise er605 is similar to ubiquiti er-x / mikrotik hex (mt7621) and eap610 is similar to u6-lite ; software wise er-x doesn’t work with unifi.;
A Ubiquiti UDR is somewhat comparable all in one at $200.
Omada ecosystem has a ton of wireless devices in it, at the end of the day - if you’re unhappy with range you can always get more and extend your network with more access points using long flat cat6 under carpets around runners around door frames etc etc (not too expensive nor time intensive).
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